Michel Houellebecq novel ruffles literary world again

Michel Houellebecq, above, faces plagiarism claims from Michel Lévy whose book has the same title. Photograph: Sean Smith for the Guardian

The latest literary offering by the French author Michel Houellebecq was supposed to be his least incendiary yet: a satirical novel that kept the sexism, violence and racial hatred to a minimum. In their place, however, has slid another brewing controversy: alleged plagiarism.

A writer from the southern French city of Nimes has today claimed publicly that the title of La carte et le territoire (The map and the territory) was that of a manuscript he published himself in 1999. Michel Lévy said Houellebecq "could not have been unaware" of this: Lévy's sister, Michelle, was at the time the chair and founder of a Friends of Michel Houellebecq association, now defunct.

"The writer came to see my sister on numerous occasions and could not have been unaware that I was publishing a book with this title," Levy, 55, told Le Parisien, adding that his own work had been catalogued in the French national library. "This cannot be down to chance."

But lawyers at the French-language publishing house Flammarion have disagreed. In a letter to Lévy the publisher said the title was "an association of two commonly used words" and could not be claimed by anyone as their own work.

As legally unfounded as they might be the allegations nonetheless add to an argument over plagiarism which last week drew attention to the fact that Houellebecq had taken several passages of La carte et le territoire from Wikipedia.

In an article entitled The possibility of plagiarism, the French version of the news website Slate compared passages from the novel with entries on the online encyclopaedia, and concluded they were virtually identical. The Slate commentators then invited readers to talk about whether the passages – on a hunting activist, the town of Beauvais, and the housefly – were instances of unashamed copying or stylistic technique.

On the housefly, Houellebecq writes: "Adult flies live from two weeks to a month in nature, or longer in laboratory conditions. After emerging from the pupa, the flies stop growing. Small flies are not young flies, but flies which have had insufficient food during their larval stage."

Wikipedia's entry, translated, is: "Adults live from half a month to a month in nature, or longer in the more comfortable conditions of a laboratory. After emerging from the pupa, the flies stop growing. Small flies are not young flies, but flies which have not had enough food during their larval stage."

But for the author of Atomised and the possibility of an island, the answer is clear. "If people really think that [this is plagiarism], then they haven't the first notion of what literature is … It is part of my method," he said, branding his accusers "incompetents" in a video on Le Nouvel Observateur's website.

His decision to take from Wikipedia, he said, was akin to techniques used by other globally renowned writers, such as Jorge Luis Borges and Georges Perec.

But, he added, the accusation of copying would stick… "When you use a big word like plagiarism, even if the accusation is ridiculous, something [of the accusation] will always remain. It's like racism."

These minor controversies will do little to harm critical reaction to the novel, regarded as Houellebecq's best chance yet of winning France's supreme literary prize, the Goncourt. Released yesterday the award's shortlist features La carte et le territoire alongside the latest novel by fellow Gallic hellraiser, the author of Baise-moi, Virginie Despentes.